Numbers, dates and money: what trips everyone up

French counts in twenties above sixty, a leftover from an older system: quatre-vingts is literally four twenties. It is not a quirk invented to annoy learners — it is a fossil, and like most fossils it survives precisely in the words used most often.

The listening problem it creates is real: hearing soixante tells you nothing, because the number might be sixty, or sixty-something, or seventy-something. You have to wait for the end. That is why numbers feel harder in French than the arithmetic suggests — and why they need to be trained by ear rather than learnt from a page.

Useful to know, and rarely said: Belgium and Switzerland use septante and nonante, which are regular and much easier. They are correct French. If you learn French to work with Belgian or Swiss colleagues, you will hear these, and they are worth recognising.

• The day comes first, in speech and in writing. A date written with numbers alone is read day-month-year, which is the opposite of the American convention and a genuine source of missed appointments.
• Months and days are not capitalised — lundi, mars. Writing them with a capital is one of the most visible marks of an English-speaking writer.
• Only the first of the month is ordinal. The rest are plain numbers.
• Times are commonly given on a twenty-four hour clock, especially for appointments and transport.

Textbooks teach the full form. Shops do not use it. A price is usually said as two numbers with the currency at the end or not at all, and the cents follow the euros directly. If you are waiting for the word « euros » to appear in the middle of the number, you will miss the price.

Two more things worth knowing before your first week in France: the decimal separator is a comma, not a point; and thousands are separated by a space, not a comma. A price written 1 250,50 is one thousand two hundred and fifty euros fifty — not something else.

Numbers are the clearest case in the language where knowing is not enough. Everybody knows how seventy is built; almost nobody catches it at speed the first hundred times. It is a reflex, and reflexes are trained by repetition under time pressure.

• Have someone say prices and times quickly and write them down. Two minutes a lesson is enough.
• Say your own phone number, aloud, until it comes without counting.
• Read the price aloud every time you look at one, in French, for a week.
• Practise the year, the amounts and the times you will actually need — a birthdate, a salary, a train time.